by Ian Douglas
“Is it true that you are in line to take over Lord Adler’s seat on the Council?”
Again, that flash of winning smile. “That, Barbra, is entirely up to the other members of the Council and what they feel is best for our community. But if asked to serve, I most certainly perform my civic duty to the very best of my ability. . . .”
Lisa switched the feed off. So far as she could tell, the various news shows and talking-head round tables available over SNN were almost purely entertainment, rather than news feeds intended to be factually informative. News stories tended to be centered on certain basic human emotions—fear was the most common one—and were designed to wring what they could from those emotions in order to keep the human population watching the programs.
And as a result, the worry and discontent within only grew. By the time one peril resolved itself, another had taken its place.
What, she wondered, was the point?
If she wanted to worry, she would continue focusing on Grayson and on Roger. Hope, she realized, was another of those human emotions with which she’d been programmed.
And she hoped that both of them would return to Tellus safely . . . and soon.
Conference Room One was an enormous and luxuriously appointed room with high cathedral ceilings and a viewing wall that curved around two sides of the space. Ad Astra was large as spacecraft went, and with her alien-derived zero-point energy generators she had power to spare and could afford to be spacious inside. The conference rooms were located inside the Carousel, forward of Ad Astra’s bridge.
St. Clair took his place at the head of the mirror-polished mahogany table and waited as other men and women filed in. The display wall, though called a transparency in general usage, was not a window but a sophisticated display screen. Right now it was set to show surrounding space, with the sprawl of two colliding galaxies stretched from one side of the room to the other. The feed was being relayed from external cameras on the ship’s hull, and so did not show the carousel’s rotation.
An older man in a civilian tunic walked in and slapped his e-tablet on the table with a crack. “Why,” Dr. Francois Dumont said, sounding irritated to the point of outright anger, “do we have to trek up here to the Wheel for this nonsense? There is such a thing as implant linking, you know!”
As a civilian, Dumont wasn’t completely under St. Clair’s jurisdiction to order around, so he elected not to chide him for an out-loud grumble that verged on insubordination. The fact was, St. Clair didn’t even think such a chiding would have much effect on the doctor. Civilians worked to a different beat.
Hell, at times he was convinced they worked in a different universe.
“The Andromedan Dark,” St. Clair said mildly, “has shown a propensity for getting at our personnel through their cerebral links. Lord Adler, remember? And Subcommander Francesca?” Dumont blanched at that, which St. Clair expected as he pressed on. “This is a general meeting for all department heads, and we’re still close to the area where the Dark recently staged an extradimensional attack on this vessel. I’d rather have all of us walk to a conference room than run the risk of every department head on this ship being turned inside out or driven insane in one fell swoop.”
“Ah . . . well. . . .” Dumont said. “There is that.”
“How long do you anticipate restricting use of the Net, my lord?” Dr. Paul Tsang Wanquan wanted to know. The civilian head of Ad Astra’s astronomy department took a seat across from Dumont.
“That’s part of what I want to discuss here,” St. Clair replied. “Subcomm Jablonsky? You have someone working on the Roceti data?”
“Yes, sir,” Subcommander Tomasz Jablonsky, head of Ad Astra’s AI department, replied with a jerky nod of his head. He indicated a young woman taking her seat next to his. “Lieutenant Lam Mingzhu, here, has been working directly with Newton to try to pull some useful data out of that mess.”
“Any luck with that, Lieutenant?” St. Clair asked.
“No, my lord,” she replied. “Or . . . not very much. There is a lot of data in the encyclopedia.”
“I understand. Maybe this meeting will help you focus your searches,” St. Clair told Lam. “I’m going to be noting a number of particular subjects that I want you to concentrate on. We’re flying blind here, and it is imperative that we learn what it is that we’re up against.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“At the top of the list, I want every reference you can find to higher-dimensional travel or attacks. The Cooperative has been dealing with the Dark for millions of years. They ought to have some idea by now how far the Dark can strike, using extra dimensions as a shortcut.”
“Yes, sir.”
St. Clair looked back at the faces now gathered around the table, all of them watching him expectantly. “Very well,” he said. “Looks like everyone’s here. Let’s try to figure out just where we’re going. . . .”
Chapter Fourteen
“And three . . . and two . . . and one . . . drop!”
Within the Stygian darkness of the alien dimension, the trio of Devil Toads dropped from the belly of the Vera Cruz and began drifting toward the infinite plain below. Inside each, forty Marines in full armor sat confined inside their landing cages, wondering what they would find when they reached their designated landing zone. Roger Kilgore checked his pulse rifle one final time, grateful that the powers-that-be had decided to send them riding in style, packed into the belly of a Toad, rather than scattering them across the sky like a swarm of insects.
There were pluses and minuses for both choices, of course. The Toad made a better target than a lone Marine, and a kill would take out an entire forty-Marine platoon in one swift flash. On the other hand, it carried a fair amount of armor, it possessed defensive EM shields, and, most important of all, it carried its own assortment of heavy firepower for close-in ground support. Adrift out in space with nothing but an armored suit between you and the hostiles, you felt so damned naked.
“Whatcha think, Skipper?” Sergeant Kalinin asked. “Are we headed for a hot LZ?”
“We’ll know in a few minutes, Sergeant,” Captain Byrne replied. The Devil Toad gave a sudden lurch, and he added, “Hang on, everybody! We’re hitting atmosphere!”
IO-1 was massive enough to have acquired a substantial atmosphere. According to the readouts, it was composed primarily of hydrogen, with small percentages of helium and minute traces of carbon dioxide, methane, and ammonia. Since the Bluestar object was unlikely to have experienced outgassing events in its history, the likely explanation was that it had simply picked up the gasses gravitationally little by little out of interstellar space.
Which argued that it was old, that it had been wandering through space for a very long time indeed. Interstellar gas was tenuous in the extreme—less than an atom per cubic centimeter—and the atmosphere surrounding the Bluestar object was thicker than the gas envelope surrounding Earth.
The Devil Toad shuddered as it plowed in through thickening atmosphere. Kilgore felt the sharp deceleration as they pulled up short above the thing’s surface. On his in-head, he could see the crashed Black Hawk gunship lying on its side next to what looked like a series of low, featureless white buildings. A red icon pulsed like a strobe light, an emergency beacon.
Kilgore found himself missing that odd, extradimensional vision he’d been wrestling with earlier. It would have been good to be able to see inside the wreck. He considered asking Vera Cruz’s AI to remove the block on his vision for a moment.
And then, a bit irrationally, he decided he didn’t want to see inside the Black Hawk after all. Not really.
The Devil Toad lander slowed drastically, gentling up to within a few dozen meters of the Black Hawk before extending its squat landing legs and settling to the ground. Kilgore was uncertain as to whether to call that shining, white surface “ground” or “floor.” It was patently artificial . . . but it defined a world so huge that architectural terms seemed wildly inappropriate. He didn’t have tim
e to muse on it for long.
“Marines! Unhook your cages!” Cartwell, the platoon sergeant, ordered, and the platoon unstrapped themselves from their protective cages and stood in a double line on the cargo bay deck. “On your feet! Sound off! Alvarez!”
“Aqui!”
“Ames!”
“Yo!”
“Andrews!”
“Ooh-rah!”
“Becker!”
The roll call ran down the line, hard and fast. The rear hatch ground open, and First Platoon, Bravo Company of the Marine 1/3 thundered down the ramp.
Outside, the wind was blowing hard. It was cold, too; Kilgore’s armor was registering a brisk minus 120 Celsius in the surrounding air. The pocket dimension in which Bluestar was hiding evidently had no central heating—no local star—and was frigid as a result. That it was as warm as minus 120 meant that it was generating heat, lots of heat, deep inside itself.
The ground, surprisingly, was completely clear of dust, smooth, hard, and shiny. He would have expected that surface to have acquired a layer of dust, like the lunar regolith, in the same way it had picked up an atmosphere over the eons. Possibly the weirdly contortionist hyperdimensional movements they’d all witnessed earlier shook such debris off . . . or there might be some sort of electrostatic effect. The surface was smooth enough that walking on it was like walking on ice, and Kilgore had to watch each step.
The sky, Kilgore noted, was pitch-black straight overhead, but shaded to a deep midnight blue around the horizon, illuminated, evidently, by the eerie glow from the Bluestar itself.
With dazzlingly bright searchlights playing across the white surface below them, the other two Toads touched down nearby, and Second and Fourth Platoons filed out, before all three of the landers lifted off once more. They would hover in the area, watching for incoming threats and ready to lay down covering fire if necessary. Their bulky, clumsy presence in the black and featureless sky was a genuine comfort.
Under Cartwell’s bellowed instructions, Fourth Platoon set up a perimeter around the entire LZ, while First began moving toward the downed gunship.
Kilgore could see from ten meters away that the Black Hawk’s port side had ripped wide open on impact. Gunships were not heavily armored, relying on maneuverability and their small target cross section as protection from incoming fire. The Black Hawk evidently had hit the ground at a quite shallow angle and slid for three times its own fifty-five-meter length before coming to a cockeyed halt.
“Kilgore! Rees!” Cartwell called. “Check it out!”
Weapons at the ready, they moved ahead of the other Marines.
What the hell am I doing here? The question had been in the back of his mind for some time now, but a growing sense of dread had brought it up front and out in the open. He was a Marine. He’d expected to be deployed into strange surroundings, protecting Humankind’s interests against some strange, sapient life-forms. That said, when the 3/1 had been deployed to the Tellus Ad Astra expedition, he’d expected to spend at least the next year of his life at the galactic core, stationed twenty-five thousand light years from home with the Terran Imperial Embassy Guard.
So nothing had even begun to prepare him for this, investigating the twists and hidden recesses of alien dimensions so remote in space and time from home he was having trouble grasping it. Ugly nightmare beings with too many legs and eyes were all in a day’s work; creatures that could pop in and out of normal 3-D space without regard for walls or boundaries were terrifying. It was like facing an enemy that didn’t follow the rules. . . .
No, worse than that. In the last several centuries, the Imperial Marines—and the U.S. and Royal Marines before that—had more than once faced insurgents who didn’t follow the same rulebook—hiding among crowds of civilians, say, or smuggling in weapons hidden inside cases of medical supplies. That was the nature of asymmetric warfare, and they were trained both to expect and combat it. Out here, the Marines didn’t even know if there were rules, let alone what they are.
And sooner or later that was going to get them killed.
“I think we can get in through here,” Rees said. She was standing next to the tear in the gunship’s side, stooped, peering in.
“Cover me, Kari,” Kilgore said. Pushing past her, he stepped through the tear and into the gunship’s interior.
“I’m inside,” he said. “Do we have a deck plan?”
“Comin’ up, Gunny,” Byrne said. “The bridge is to your left, down a passageway for ten meters . . . then up two ladders to the O-3 deck.”
Rees joined him inside, looking around. “Damage doesn’t look too bad.”
“I’m not getting any life signs.”
“Yeah. . . .”
“Down this way.”
Following the deck plan showing in an in-head window, Kilgore led Rees to the indicated ladder well. The ship was laying at roughly a fifty-degree angle, so they had to make their way along both the deck and one bulkhead, then turn and crawl along the ladder.
“Kil?”
“Mm?”
“Check your life readout.”
“I see it. Maybe we have some survivors after all.”
But the in-head display, overlaid on the deck plan schematic, was . . . strange. Fuzzy and spread out. Biosensing gear picked up heat and movement at a distance; up close it could distinguish between various types of metabolism—the chemical reactions of living tissue. They weren’t close enough yet for that kind of fine detail; what he was reading might be a fire. . . .
That was a scary thought. The atmosphere outside was 90 percent hydrogen. The ship’s internal atmosphere had partially vented with the crash, but was still quite high in oxygen—almost 12 percent—with a lot of nitrogen. Oxygen mixing with hydrogen meant there was a potential for an explosion, a big one. And if something was burning beyond that bulkhead ahead. . . .
Kilgore tried to remember the stoichiometry of hydrogen. He didn’t remember offhand, and didn’t have the data loaded in his in-head RAM. He could have called back to the Vera Cruz and asked for a download, but . . .
Fuck it. If that was a fire in there, it would have already ignited the hydrogen. Besides, the temperature was quite low—just above freezing. The wreck obviously had been losing heat in the cold environment; possibly the cold was blocking Kilgore’s infrared reading off the bulkhead. They were seeing something, though, and that meant—
Nightmare horrors plunged toward Kilgore and Rees, leaping from a spot just before the bulkhead and seemingly out of nowhere. Kilgore had a brief, confused impression of tentacles, claws, and leprous bodies . . . or indistinct shapes appearing and disappearing in thin air . . . of pieces breaking from the larger mass and scuttling toward them with a nightmarish life of their own . . . and mixed in with them, horribly, were several human bodies, moving forward with the writhing mass.
“Don’t shoot!” Rees yelled. “That’s Black Hawk’s crew!”
Even as she said it Kilgore’s internal circuitry had already pinged the lead, ship-suited figure; it IDed as Lt. Yuri Olegski.
Even if Kilgore had known the man—he didn’t—he would never have recognized him. Olegski’s flesh appeared to be dissolving . . . melting . . . turning into a frothy black ooze. Kilgore could see white bone above the lidless, staring eyes, and even the bone was deforming as if melting away into black slime.
Reflexively, he brought up his laser rifle and triggered it.
The explosion tossed both Rees and Kilgore back down the canted passageway several meters, as red flame licked around them. “Jesus, Kilgore!” Rees shouted, but Kilgore scrambled to his feet and pulled her upright.
“C’mon!” he said. “We’re out of here!”
Boots pounding on the canted deck, they raced back down the passageway searching for the way out.
The argument had been raging for fifteen minutes now, and they were no closer to a resolution than they’d been at the start. Twenty men and women had responded to St. Clair’s summons to Conference Room On
e, most of them senior heads of department. He’d started off asking for a consensus on the nature of the Bluestar threat, and what it meant for the human castaways.
So far, there’d been damned little agreement.
“Bluestar,” St. Clair said in an attempt at a summation. “What can we say about it for sure?”
“Our best guess is that it is an artificial structure as large as a big planet,” Symms, the ExComm, said. She ticked off the points established in the debate so far. “It’s inhabited . . . I should say potentially inhabited by billions of individual life-forms. It is mobile and transdimensional, slipping between our normal universe of three dimensions and the high-D space of string physics more or less at will. It appears to be aligned with the Andromedan Dark. The extradimensional aspect certainly fits with what the Kroajid call Dhalat K’graal, the ‘Minds from Higher Angles.’”
“It is the Andromedan Dark,” Francois Dumont said. “Of that there can absolutely be no question!”
“No, we can’t say that, Dumont,” Dr. Caryl Aguilera said. She was a specialist in the xenosophontology department, and, therefore, technically answered to Dumont. Where his specialty was xenotechnology, however, hers was xenosociology—the study of alien social structures and organization. There was, St. Clair understood, little love lost between the two, and now he was experiencing that. “It seems much more likely that the Bluestar represents a splinter group of the Andromedan Dark proper. We’ve already seen proof that the Dark, as we understand it from Kroajid sources, is not monolithic. The Xam—”